Mixed Experience History Month 2015: Mildred Loving, social justice pioneer

Mildred Loving’s challenge of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law led to the Supreme Court’s 1967 decision  (Loving v. Virginia) which affirmed the right of people of different races to marry.  Loving and her white husband, Richard, were arrested when they returned home to their rural Virginia town and pled guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.”  It was illegal for whites and blacks to marry in at least 17 states at the time.  In its landmark unanimous ruling the Court stated: “There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry soley because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause.”  My parents married in 1965 in Denmark; it was illegal for them to marry in South Carolina, the location of my father’s next assignment.  When my father’s work superiors found out that he had married a white woman, he was relocated to the Pacific Northwest instead.  Mildred Loving died in 2008 at the age of 68.-Heidi Durrow

Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by The New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks and events involved in the Mixed experience.  Please look for archived profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog!  Thanks for reading.  And check out some of the previous year’s profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012,  2013, 2014. Copyright 2015.